Re: Question about git

[Simos Xenitellis <simos lists googlemail com>]

On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 7:30 AM, Filippo Argiolas <fargiolas gnome org> wrote:
> On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 2:23 AM, Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org> wrote:
>> On 05/06/2009 07:00 AM, Simos Xenitellis wrote:
>>>
>>> On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 4:41 PM, Behdad Esfahbod<behdad behdad org>  wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On 05/05/2009 01:28 AM, Shaun McCance wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>> This assumes that the branch is merged into master otherwise.  I
>>>>>> strongly
>>>>>> suggest cherry-pick instead of merge.
>>>>>
>>>>> Isn't that going to cause merge conflicts for me the
>>>>> maintainer when I try to merge from my stable branches
>>>>> to master?  I can pretty much guarantee I will always
>>>>> do that.  If I have to deal with merge conflicts from
>>>>> one of 100 translations each time, I'm not going to
>>>>> be happy.
>>>>
>>>> I *think* if the same commit exists in the destination, it doesn't cause
>>>> a
>>>> merge conflict.  But I didn't test it to make sure right now.
>>>
>>> I have tried a few scenarios with 'git merge' and I managed to get a
>>> situation that merge could not take place.
>>> After that, it was not possible to commit and the message was too
>>> cryptic to figure out what to do.
>>> In terms of usability for this process, it was good (I was blocked
>>> from messing up further),
>>> so I resorted to the HowTo item from live.gnome.org named 'Ok, I
>>> messed up, what do I do' in order to reset my clone.
>>>
>>> As a workflow, I find that the following is easy to follow
>>> 1. First commit to your branch (such as gnome-2-26) as normal.
>>> 2. Then, checkout 'master' and 'git merge gnome-2-26'
>>> 3. Observe that no errors appear and that only your changes are merged.
>>> 4. Do a 'git push' to push your work to git.gnome.org.
>>
>> What if the branch was not merged, perhaps intentionally?  Now the
>> translator will be pushing code changes.
>
> I'd like to stress Behdad's point here: merging stable into master is
> not something a translator should even consider to do, it is a
> maintainer's job, and most of all it is potentially harmful.
> While it could be a common practice that changes to the stable branch
> are merged back into the development one there is absolutely no
> warranty about it.
> Stable and master are two separate lines of development, there could
> be large portions of code that have been removed, whole files deleted.
> Just try git merge gnome-2-26 with epiphany for example you will see
> tons of code changes getting merged with your translation some file
> that was removed is restored etc. Fortunately this merge fails but it
> could success if there are less deep changes between the two branches.
> So *please* remove that merge reference from the translator's howto.
> git cherry-pick is the way to go.
> git commit returns the hash of the commit if it succeeds so I don't
> think it is so difficult to copy and paste it into the cherry-pick
> command line.

OK, I have updated the instructions at
http://live.gnome.org/TranslationProject/GitHowTo#head-0a9ee3ff743fcd06eb70ab98c93780c48d724a1f

I copy here:

# We assume you checked out the branch gnome-2-26 and you updated your
LL.po, and you are about to commit the change as normal.
$ git commit -m "Updated Greek translation" el.po
[gnome-2-26 4d7a0af] Updated Greek translation
 1 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)
$ git checkout master
Switched to branch "master"
$ git cherry-pick 4d7a0af
Finished one cherry-pick.
[master fdb65b4] Updated Greek translation
 1 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)
$ git push
Counting objects: 12, done.
Delta compression using 4 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (7/7), done.
Writing objects: 100% (7/7), 745 bytes, done.
Total 7 (delta 5), reused 0 (delta 0)
To ssh://simos git gnome org/git/yelp/
   9861647..4d7a0af  gnome-2-26 -> gnome-2-26
   152258a..fdb65b4  master -> master
$ _

Thanks for picking up this issue,
Simos